Come As You Are. Amy J. Fetzer
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“Oh, Andy,” she said in her best throaty whisper. “You say the sweetest things.”
He cringed. He hated being called that. But Andrew Chaison Coppethwaite was too snotty British. He was anything but. Cute, in decent shape, he had a dry sense of humor and a nice butt, but off limits. Too young and she never involved herself with a colleague. Not that she had many. As a National Geographic Society location scout, she worked alone. When someone in the headquarters got a keen idea to do a show or a series on some obscure tribe or ruins, Tessa got all the fun. She was the first to arrive and scouted out more than location. She arranged everything from authorization from the local governments to hiring local guides and translators for the actual filming. In between and during, she got to do what she loved: travel, explore, dive, rock climb, even live with a tribe that modern culture just skipped past.
A mocha latte and i-Pod free zone.
“Need I remind you, we’re on deadline.”
“No, you are. Nothing goes ahead till I give the all clear.”
Tessa understood his impatience. Andrew wanted to get back to his creature comforts—a running toilet, a shower and an occasional cigar. She couldn[‘t care less. Peeing outdoors, showering under a waterfall were just minor inconveniences compared with experiencing cultures that most people never knew existed and were still in the Dark Ages. It was tranquil. Crimes didn’t exist here, no extremists trying to blow themselves up. No murderers or twisted sociopaths. Probably because the chief was the ruler and his justice was swift and very deadly. Then again, the islanders were the descendants of cannibals. Misbehave, and heads would roll, she thought, smiling.
Cannibalism wasn’t a practice on the remote islands anymore—or so the Fijians told her—but then, most didn’t get this close. She didn’t take her gaze off the dance and the story told in wild gyrations. Acted out by several warriors, it dramatized the arrival of the Europeans and their subsequent deaths.
Bet they were tasty, too.
She loved her job. There wasn’t so much as a telephone line on this island, a little difficult when her job required communication. Even now, she felt the weight of her satellite phone on the back of her skirt pulling it down and probably giving Andrew a good show of her butt, yet it was all she could do to conceal it. She didn’t want to offend these people, but she wasn’t willing to give up that much of her modern life. Help, if she needed it, was on the other end. Though it was days away. Sorta like paddling with your hands; she’d get there, just not swiftly.
A woman approached her with a broad wooden cup made from a coconut shell. Tessa had been through the ritual before, and she clapped once, clasped her hands, then took the cup. She drank the yaqona in a single mouthful before returning the cup to the woman, then clapped three times. “Maca,” she said.
The woman smiled approvingly, then offered the same cup to Andrew.
“Do as I did or you’ll offend.”
He obeyed, yet as the beautiful dark-skinned woman took back the cup, she eyed him from head to toe, not unkindly, before walking away.
“She loves me.”
“Or she thinks you’ll make a good Steak Tartare.” Tessa patted his stomach and grinned at his horrified look.
A warrior gestured to her to join the dance with the women, and Tessa had seen enough to know the moves. She joined in, but not before handing her Sat phone to Andrew. “If my mom calls, ignore it.”
A man answering her phone would just bring too many questions and her mom was in her “fix Tessa up with so and so’s son” place again. People couldn’t understand that she was perfectly content to live out of a backpack, travel and explore. How many times did a person get to shake booty with the descendants of cannibals?
As she slipped into the dance, Andrew hooked the phone on his belt and watched Tessa sway as if she were born to it. She stood out, not because of her hair or body, but because she was the only one not wiggling her bare breasts for the crowd. Damn shame.
She was about the most exciting woman he’d ever met, beyond that she was athletically fearless and drank up her surroundings like a sponge. He’d seen her hang from a cliff a thousand feet above rocky ground and be comfortable enough in her skill to actually sleep, a couple of ropes and a few carabiners the only things keeping her from being squashed on the rocks. That took guts, which he freely admitted he didn’t have, but his job was catching it on film, enough that the producers could make a judgment call on location and content.
From the talk amongst the Society, she’d done the photography herself till it had taken negotiations to get her out of China last year. After the government ignored her NGS credentials and locked her in a women’s prison, NGS insisted she have a partner. She didn’t like it, and warned him the first day. “Keep up, clam up, take the pictures. I’m not helpless, nor a piece of ass. You’ll learn the other rules as we go.”
He preferred his women a little less intimidating, ones who thought of him as more than a camera flunky. The older-woman thing aside, he’d like to think a good shagging would change that, but the truth was, she was out of his league. Way out. There was something about her, a hawklike awareness of people and her surroundings that came with emotional baggage. As much as he had midnight fantasies about her, he wouldn’t cross the line.
Andrew stepped back from the glow of the fires and lifted his camera, putting her in a frame. She avoided being photographed, insisting people didn’t read the magazine or watch NGS shows to see a nobody in the wild. Yet as her arms lifted to the sky, willowy and tanned, he clicked off a few shots, then settled on the soft sand to watch Tessa Carlyle go native.
Aboard Dragon Six
Max dragged black duffel bags up the loading ramp and into the cargo jet. “We’re doing this so you can beat the living shit out of him, right?”
Logan didn’t glance up. “That’s about it, yes.”
“Just checking.” Max cleared his throat, then added, “You don’t think we should have a really stable moral ground to be standing on?”
“Not so much.”
“McGill was lying, gagged so tight he was purple.”
“He’s desperate.” Logan glanced back as he secured his medical gear inside the aircraft. “He’s got a finger in the dike. Going outside assures no one in Washington would have the chance to leak it. So, of course, there’s more to it.”
“That’s what scares me,” Max said. “How did the first team die?”
Sebastian slipped a file in the pocket behind a seat, knuckling it. “It’s in here. A two-man team. Videotape starts just as they move toward the VP’s summer residence. Government troops were waiting for them. Ambushed before they got a foot on the property.” The team straightened from their duties and looked at Sebastian. “They were betrayed.”
By one of their own and Logan would bet his money on Ramos. Ramos knew there would be a rescue attempt. It was SOP, standard operating procedure. There was always a backup plan.
“It’s in the file, all classified.” Sebastian stepped into the cockpit. “McGill wasn’t supposed to give us that.”
“It’s more bullshit,” Logan said. “The man’s holding out.” Politically, the U.S. couldn’t touch this, so it had to be worse than just getting Ramos out of the hot seat before a decayed body showed up. The jungle was a big place, ruins had been hidden for centuries, losing one body would be a snap. Ramos was there to do more and it went back to his intelligence and the source. The CIA.
“No outcry from Venezuela, or evidence of bodies, by the way.”
“That would be admitting we were there.”
The first team was CIA, highly trained with good Intel. Killed or captured, they were set up to fail.
Sebastian ran down his preflight checklist. “If they wanted,